High School Choice in New York City: A Report on the School Choices and Placements of Low-Achieving Students

School choice policies, a fixture of efforts to improve public education in many cities. aim to enable families to choose a school that they believe will best meet their child's needs. In New York City, choice and the development of a diverse portfolio of options have played central roles in the Department of Education's high school reform efforts. This report examines the choices and placements of New York City's lowest-achieving students: those scoring among the bottom 20 percent on standardized state tests in middle school. Focusing on data from 2007 to 2011, the report looks at who these low-achieving students are, including how their demographics compare to other students in NYC, the educational challenges they face, and where they live. The bulk of the report reviews low-achieving students' most preferred schools and the ones to which they were ultimately assigned, assessing how these schools compare to those of their higher-achieving peers. The findings show that low-achieving students attended schools that were lower performing, on average, than those of all other students. This was driven by differences in students' initial choices: low-achieving students' first-choice schools were less selective, lower-performing, and more disadvantaged. Overall, lower-achievingand higher-achieving students were matched to their top choices at the same rate. Importantly, both low- and higher-achieving students appear to prefer schools that are close to home, suggesting that differences in students' choices likely reflect, at least in part, the fact that lower-achieving students are highly concentrated in poor neighborhoods, where options may be more limited.

Document Type

Language

Geography

This web page is marked up with Schema.org microdata. Much of the necessary microdata is embedded within the HTML that creates the display you see above. The data that shows below is formatted for machine-reading and rounds out the complete descriptive set for this resource. Want more info about all of this? Go here. You can also view the complete dataset for this resource the way a machine sees it here .

Title: High School Choice in New York City: A Report on the School Choices and Placements of Low-Achieving Students
Publication date 2013-04-25
Publication Year 2013
Authors
Sean P. Corcoran
, Lori Nathanson
, Christine Baker-Smith
Copyright holder(s)
Institute for Education and Social Policy at New York University
, The Research Alliance for New York City Schools
Geographical Focus
North America / United States (Northeastern) / New York / New York County / New York City
Keywords
achieving students
, choice schools
, choice
, first choice
, school choice
Document type
Report/Whitepaper
Language
English
URL: https://www.issuelab.org/resource/high-school-choice-in-new-york-city-a-report-on-the-school-choices-and-placements-of-low-achieving-students.html
Resource provided by IssueLab